The stars are beautiful tonight. I watch them nightly without fail, cautiously looking for answers in the night sky. Sprawled less than gracefully over the patchy hill of wild grass, I spend hours getting lost in the vast expanse. After a long day of tired travel, the knoll I lay on becomes my bed, the stars my respite from harsh realities. As I stare onward and past the brightest of them, I stay mesmerized by the idea that life is out there, possibly watching me back. But what would they see? A grassy hill, a man, his carrots. Would that mean anything to anyone? I find it’s best not to think about that part. All I need to worry myself with is my carrots.
I have lots of carrots. A countless bunch, continually growing to be harvested. They stretch as far as the eye can see, tidy rows of green, leafy stalks. The carrots are my life’s purpose, my magnum opus, my salvation. So I dedicate myself to them. I spend my days engulfed in their needs, weeding and harvesting. There are enough carrots that I can’t tend to them all on my own. After as many harvests as suit my fancy, I leave to care for another vast field. I wander through the overgrown fields of months and years gone by, taming the weeds and cultivating the fields for a number of weeks until more carrots can grow again. It’s important to me to see my loved ones, I can never go too long without stopping by or someone might get restless.
Illustration: Introduction to farmer in a field of carrots. Beard is long, hair shoulder length.
Each field grows it’s own personality as much as it grows carrots. Some fields are impatient, strangling out the plants with toxic soil and gravel. Some of them are soothing, like a mother tending it’s child. The fine earthy ground gently kissing the carrots as they grow. I speak to them, and they speak back with their fruitful harvest and swaying breeze. I spend most of my time throughout the year tending to Gwendolyn, the south field. She has been there from the beginning, her carrots are second to none. She cares for me, and I care for her. Her valley is nestled between two scenic mountains, rivers flowing into deltas beneath, nourishing her life giving body.
I’ve only ever climbed her mountains once, though I have had every opportunity in the world to do so. That would take me away from the fields, and without a gardener, the carrots would suffer. I stay, for there are greater purposes at work. This spring has been fruitful, which means I must get back to Gwendolyn. The river has been widening, so I am almost home, maybe a day or two’s journey. Then I will be again in her sweet embrace, to tend to her carrots for another season.
As I pass the split of the river, I’m greeted to the first of many rows, curving gently off into the distance. Like a reunion of two long forgotten lovers, the sight leaves flutters in my core. Even without my tending hands, Gwendolyn takes care of herself. White blossoms speckle the tops of her green hair, a sure sign that the carrots have begun to grow wild. But despite the lack of her caretaker, she is still as green and lush as the day that I left.
I wander further, carefully passing directly over each row of wild carrots, barely visible since I left. The rows bend more visibly as I count them down, and a knot forms in my stomach. It is Gwendolyn’s only flaw, one of my making. I have planted straight rows for longer than I remember, they are the one true way to garden. Unerring paths, unprejudiced by surroundings, that is the both the model for my garden and my heart. But Gwendolyn is different, the last of her kind. I refuse to replant her, as it has become as much a part of her as my past is a part of me. She was one of the first fields I ever planted, and it’s a relic of a time long past. If I were to walk alongside the rows instead of across them, I would walk for hours, days, and years without ever finding an end. Each row finds its way back to itself, in perfectly formed, concentric circles. That is my sin, for what lies at the very center of those circles is the end of everything. It is a secret centuries old, the only reminder of my past, and of my future. It is my way back.
Illustration: Introduction to the monument. Tall, dark, geometric monolith, set against the backdrop of wild carrots. Vines are only beginning to creep up the sides.
The metal is speckled yet smooth, cool to the touch on the dark side of the large, cylindrical monument. Reaching far over my head, it watched Gwendolyn in my absence. The small seam of an unopened door framed the control panel. I couldn’t bring myself to face it, I hide in the shadows of the morning sun, where I am comfortable ignoring the inevitable. I’m not ready to press the buttons even a single time more. Not until I have reached my goal. I’m unsure of how the door works, I am not a smart man. But I do know where it will take me. It will open one day, I will walk through it, and it will all be over. The carrots will be my key.
As Gwendolyn grows more lovely every day, so do I become more anxious. The day draws closer, and I wonder if I was up to the task. The monument is a constant reminder, the only thorn in my field of orange roses. The solitude becomes more than I can bear at times, and only when it becomes too great to bear do I ever dare leave my Gwendolyn. But I must confront the monument, even for a moment, to let myself remember why I tend my fields. The men who came through that door will pay for what they have done. The vivid memories burned into my mind refuse to fade. I have been wronged, and I will right the scales in time. Time is the only thing I have more of than carrots.
You see, the fields are permitted to whither and scatter to the winds and elements. I am their master, and I leave them to die, only to revive them once again. I am not allowed that privilege. I do not wither, I cannot die. I endlessly tend my fields as a constant reminder of my pitiable state. I stopped aging centuries ago, I do not know why or how. There is much I do not know, all I know for certain is that I live, alone on a planet of endless domesticated plants. Maybe it is the atmosphere of this strange planet that is so quick to grow plant life. Maybe it is the monument. I like to think it is Gwendolyn, tending to me in the night. No matter the cause, the powers that be will not let me leave. They keep me here, in my eternal cage. The monument is the only reminder that there is left outside of my crop, which is hard to even grasp after so long.
I can hardly stand the sight of that dark, unfeeling blight upon the landscape. I left the valley soon after arriving so many years ago, searching in a frenzy for help on this foreign planet that I found myself on. Finding nobody in all of my travels, I had lost track of the valley’s location. The monument was lost to me, and with it my only tie to my humanity. I was cast about for years with no landmarks, no memories of a less than memorable place. My dreams were filled with the black obelisk that would wisk me away from my nightmares.
I wandered, scavenging across the globe for a number of decades. It was a time of meditation, and reflection. I was lost in myself, and the solitude that soaked every waking moment. Freedom was a long broken hope, unitl the day I found myself wandering along this now familiar river once again. Travelling upstream, the river began to widen and I found myself in a long forgotten valley. A soft familiarity seeped into my mind, this was the first time I truly heard her speak to me. At the time there was still a vast variety of vegetation, Gwendolyn was teeming with every color, a rich and vibrant ecosystem. I hadn’t begun to farm yet, Gwendolyn was fiery, untamed and wild. Yet she already loved me, and cared for me.
It was as I soaked in the scenic vistas that my eyes came to meet with the black, steely gaze of the unmoving monument. A century of vegetation had covered the pebbled, reflective surface, overgrowing to the point of obscurance. No amount of overgrowth could still my pounding heart, full with the hope of an escape after losing track of it for so long. The control panel was intact, still dimly lighting the buttons and switches that made up it’s face. Once cleared, my trembling finger reached out to engage the controls, to open my passage to freedom.
Illustration: Young man, shorter beard and hair. Overlooking the console of the monument, he is clearing the brush off of the control panel. Expression is surprise and relief. The glow from the panel lights his face from below.
The buttons did nothing. The switches did nothing. The endless variety of gadgets and gizmos formed a tapestry of technological artistry that overwhelmed my senses and confused my aching heart. At the end of my first week, my attempts did nothing but anger the monument, which began to emit a faint buzz from deep inside it. But that was far from the needed result to get me away from this empty planet, and no matter how hard I tried, nothing more ever came from it. I was ill equipped to solve the riddle, yet over the years I persisted. Every day I worked at the controls. I did not need food, I did not need sleep, all I needed was another moment basking in the glow of the monument. Days turned to years, the door remaining firmly closed. I was no closer to opening the door than the day that I started. I was in no hurry. Years turned to centuries. My captors were achingly superior. I was only a simple farmer caught in the grasp of something far larger than myself. I broke down further with every passing season, time slowing to a standstill.
It was an anomaly. As sure as I could feel it’s exterior, smell it’s electric, metallic shell, and hear the gentle hum of it’s internal machinations, I was equally as sure that it was unknowable. No amount of sense and logic bound it’s workings, no law governed its actions. Like trying to sit upon a cloud, my hope died with each failed attempt. My last thread to humanity had no humanity in it, nothing fathomable by my finite understanding.
As I descended into madness, Gwendolyn was there. She held me close, sustained me, showed me the way. It was not in me to rework the design of my masters, to understand the intricate secrets of the door. But she opened my eyes. My task was laid out to me, in careful detail, by her beautiful nature surrounding me and the wretched monument. I would not need to learn these secrets on my own. I would see with my own eyes, the way through the door. The answers could not be found on my desolate home, so I would look upward, heavenward. The stars would hold my answer. I would find them.
I have grown carrots since. Hundreds of years of planting, growing and feasting on their orange flesh. I slowly uprooted the invasive plants, as well as other plants that were of no use to me. Carrots slowly spread across rolling countrysides, up into the highest reaches of the mountains where everything ceased to grow. Carrots reigned the entire planet over, alone with their gardener, their master. My belly was full, my purpose was clear, and slowly but surely, my eyesight began to improve.
Illustration: Close up of the old man’s eyes, possibly from the nose up. Fingers resting on temples, pupils dilated and eyes bloodshot. Conveys the idea that his eye sight is changing, in an abstract, stylized way.
It was nearly as imperceptible as the passage of time. My eyesight stretched further than in my youth, when I took those things for granted. I began to see details in the distance in such clarity as to think they were right in front of my face. Most importantly, I could see Gwendolyn for who she really was. She was more than soil, more than carrots, more than the comforting breeze. After everything she had done to cradle me in her embrace, I could see that I loved her back.
Years turned into fleeting moments, the only milemarker in my journey being my vision slowly creeping forward. Centuries meant nothing, all that matter were the carrots. At long last, the distant mountains became a trifle, and there was nothing that I could not see. I journeyed to the top of the tallest mountain for the first and only time. Staring down upon my creation in stunning definition, with fields of beautiful green leaves in all directions, there was only one more direction to look. The experience shook me to my center, and I knew there was nothing left for me here. Nothing except my carrots, and my precious Gwendolyn. From that point on, I focused on the stars.
Within time I was able to focus far enough to settle on the first and closest planet. The carrots were working, I was peering into the darkest expanses of space, and planets began to peer back. I was able to make out large geographic areas, slowly learning to focus in on smaller details until I was counting the smallest grains of sand on an alien beach, thousands upon thousands of miles away. I pushed further and further into space, searching for the men that brought me here, stranded me here.
I spent lifetime after lifetime searching in vain. I sobbed like a child when I first saw an animal crawl out from under a steaming rock on a desert planet, the first developed life I had seen in thousands of years. I watched civilizations grow and fall, as planets orbited in and out of visibility in snapshots of life. Stranded on my own planet, I watched the universe continue to turn. I was content to keep watching. I am a patient man.
As I combed further and further, time seemed to slow down. The further I watched, the more the suspicion creeped in that time didn’t need to be a solid, unchangable line. My own existence spoke to the contrary. I had been marooned on this foraken rock for millenia, having not aged a day. Time became a play thing, a sandbox to run my fingers through as I searched the cosmos for an answer that only had meaning to myself. I saw from the beginning to the end. My sight granted me access to all the fine detail in the tapestry of time and space. In a moment of clarity and enlightenment, I could see everything.
Illustration: More abstract version of the old man, standing on top of a hill while he appears to float through space. Heavily stylized, almost like a dream sequence.
After 47,961 unfathomable years had slipped into the void, I had done it. The carrots had finished their job, there was nothing I could not see. I couldn’t believe it for the first two hundred years afterwards, in denial that I had finally found them. My gaze settled on a small planet in the far reaches of the galaxy, one populated with sprawling, monolithic doors. I convinced myself that the monolithic structures were just coincidental, but I couldn’t look away in the hopes that I would find those responsible.
They had left me here. I was left to live out my days, and then die alone on a planet on the edge of the universe. However, through the good grace of Gwendolyn, death never found me. I have been allowed to embark on this crusade, and I won’t question why. But my work was not over, there was still preparation to do. I had found them, but now I needed to leave.
As I searched for those responsible for my sentencing, I began to study the monuments themselves, which were still very much present and in use. They were on nearly every street corner, used daily by those who owned them. They were simply a form of transportation, teleporting someone through a door, then out another. Trained operators worked their magic across the control panel, flipping switches and pressing buttons. It brought a tear to my eye as I bore witness to their artistry, that even 50,000 years of trial and error could not mimic. There is nothing I have seen in my entire life that is as beautiful as the operator’s work, save for my darling green Gwendolyn.
Illustration: Show the operators of the monuments going about their daily routine, without really giving away or explaining the mystery of how the panels actually work. A snapshot of the “homeworld” in action.
I practiced year after year, working the buttons and switches until I understood everything I couldn’t learn on my own. It was masterful, the craftsmanship of these beautiful monuments that I despised so much. The moment that I was finally ready to open the door, was a moment I was unprepared for.
My entire existence collapsed into one moment, and I was unsure if it was even what I wanted after all this time. I had spent my life frozen in time, and now my feet were nearly frozen in place. But I needed to go. I needed to confront them. They needed to see me with their own two eyes, and feel the anguish of 50,000 years of solitude. Oh, they would feel it. My entire existence has led up to this point. Every carrot I have eaten has been with this end goal in sight, and now it was finally here.
With the greatest courage I could muster, I proceeded with the final gate codes, said my final goodbyes to my precious valley of carrots, and tears streamed shamelessly down my face as light broke through the seam of the door.
Illustration: Silhouetted man walking through the bright door opening. Gwendolyn seen for the first time watching over the old man as he leaves.
# There was only one man left, of the six that had passed down the sentence of exile. A court panel judge, who had a beautiful wife and three children, now long grown and moved away. He lived in a small cabin on the edge of a lake, calmly living out his days at roughly 90 years old. His wife had left him over irreconcilable differences early on, and he was left to mull over the actions of his life in solitude. He was never much for conversation anyways.
The heyday of his thirties had taken it’s toll on him, and when the exile penalty had been outlawed over ethical grounds, he had taken a good hard look at himself and the consequences of his actions. It had been a byproduct of space exploration, to eject teleportation modules into the vast reaches of space. None of the spacemen aboard the small vessels had survived, and they weren’t built for space travel in the first place. But when the teleporters landed, they remained functional. Medical emitters would have undeniably saved the explorers had they survived in any degree, but it’s a lot harder to heal someone that is dead on impact. Turns out they weren’t much use. Medicine had advanced a lot in the past one hundred years, but even eliminating natural deaths wasn’t enough to make crash landing any more natural. They lost a lot of good men in the early days, but it was a risk worth taking for progress.
Some teleportation modules landed on planets much too far away, that were too close to black holes or other anomalies. The time differential was too great, time would either move too quickly or too slowly to be useful. Those planets were the first to be repurposed into prisons. The monolith modules were intended to be more like a one way door in the first place, and it would take a hundred lifetimes to crack the encryption that kept their use secure.
All in all, it was a neat and tidy operation. You send a prisoner through, where time passed 600 times slower, and they would be dead of natural causes within a few months at most. There were quite a few designated modules and planets, and the death penalty was used lightly, so most planets were only ever utilized a single time. Even if a convict managed to survive long enough for a second prisoner alive, it was of no concern to the people. Even if they were to band together and colonize, it would be a short lived civilization on a planet millions of lightyears away. There were few female inmates in the first place, so the chances of long term survival and reproduction on a foreign planet were next to zero.
The project was ultimately binned when studies came out that suggested that calibrations were slightly off in the hardcoded instructions for each teleportation module. Instead of disabling the medical emitters, the transmitted code would turn them on to full capacity. Someone could live remarkably long if that were to happen, especially as the lone beneficiary of the life preserving cocktail being released into the air and seeped into the ground. Instead of a quick and painless exile, the powers of the judicial system might have sentenced thousands of the world’s worst convicts to solitary immortality.
The pursuit of immortality itself was abandoned centuries ago. It turns out, we are not well equipped to live forever. You could keep the body from sucumbing to disease, but nothing could stop the inescapable descent into madness of the mind. You can’t cure thoughts, and with enough time even the greatest minds would spoil. A healthy and natural life is preferable to an eternal life as a crazed animal. It was decided that even the small possibility of that fate was too inhumane, and with no communication possible between the endpoint pods, they would never know. It was a one way door, and nothing short of a direct line of communication with the home world would get anyone back through those teleporters. Yet, the judge still liked to give thought to those that he sentenced, even after all these years. By his estimation, and accounting for the time slippage on the planets they inhabited, the worst of them would have had 100,000 years pass by now. He chuckled to wonder what they might have been up to in all that time.
Illustration: A monument on a different planet, covered in scratch marks and garbled engravings, with someone in the fetal position obscured behind the monument. Insinuating a prisoner has gone mad trying to escape. Possibly female to avoid confusion with main character.
But the judge certainly wasn’t laughing when, on a warm summer morning, his personal teleporter module fired up with an incoming payload. From his reclining sofa he sipped his morning coffee, and tilted his head down the hall towards his module. He wasn’t expecting anything or anyone, but any surprise was a good surprise at his age, so he rung it through. Out stepped a crazed old man, beard swaying all the way down to his waist, with fingers stained bright green to the wrist. He was clutching two handfuls of the most dazzlingly orange carrots he had ever seen. “Who are you, and how did you get my module code? This is a private line, and you shouldn’t be here,” the judge called out nervously, shifting in his seat to better get a look at the intruder. The unsettling visitor continued slowly across the long room towards him, silently furrowing his brow, carrots shaking in his tense hands. The judge tried again to break the silence, “I’ll have you know, while those are the best looking carrots I’ve ever seen, I won’t be able to share them with you. I’m deathly allergic to carrots.” The judge’s voice cracked as he began to sweat, the man growing ever closer.
“I can see that,” uttered the man, as he took one last step to the edge of the recliner.